Episode 198 Spiritual Hospitality: Understanding the Palpable Soul

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we continue our exploration of the three levels of soul development, focusing on the concept of the palpable soul. We delve into the significance of the I-Thou relationship, as introduced by theologian Martin Buber, which emphasizes honoring the soul of another person rather than merely engaging with their ego.

We reflect on our previous discussions about the obscured and emerging souls, noting how the obscured soul often views the world in a dualistic manner, while the emerging soul begins to experience moments of self-remembering and connection with others. Dr. Howell shares personal anecdotes about palpable souls he has encountered, highlighting the deep sense of love and spiritual hospitality they exude.

Scott emphasizes the importance of embodiment practices in developing our soulality, suggesting that awareness of our energy and presence can help us navigate our spiritual journeys. We discuss the necessity of community in soul development, recognizing that while individual practices are valuable, true growth often occurs in relationship with others.

As we conclude, we reflect on the hope we find in the growing awareness of spirituality in the world today, particularly through practices like yoga and meditation. We invite our listeners to engage with our community at the Institute for Conscious Being, encouraging them to explore their own paths toward soul development. Thank you for joining us in this enlightening conversation!

To learn more about the Institute for Conscious Being, visit: theicb.info

Transcript

Scott:
You are now listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by The Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about The Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O.

Nanette: Well welcome back to The Real Enneagram, a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. I'm Nanette Mudiam and I'm here with Dr. Joseph Howell and Scott Smith. Hi guys.

Joe: Hey Nanette. Hello Nanette.

Nanette: How are we today?

Joe: Very well, I hope you are. Yeah, feeling good.

Scott: I'm doing good.

Nanette: Yeah, excited to continue our conversation on the three levels of soul development. And we've covered the first two in speaking about the obscured soul and also the emerging soul. And we are looking, hopefully today, to talk more about the palpable soul. And so, Joe, just introduce us to the concept of the palpable soul. What is that?

Joe: Well, the palpable soul, Nanette and Scott, has to do with being able to have resonance with the other. When I say either, I'm talking about having an I-thou relationship rather than a I-I relationship or an I-me relationship. It's a concept that was first brought forth by theologian Martin Buber. who wanted to explain to us that when we enter into space with another person, our soul makes that other person a thou. instead of another I. And so the I-Thou relationship is a way to illustrate the honor that we give the other person because we are addressing their soul. we are not addressing their I, which in the end means it's thou-thou relationship.

Nanette: Interesting, because thinking back about our first two weeks of discussion when we talked about the obscured soul and also the emerging soul, I don't know that we specifically address that. So just maybe if we can talk about that for a second. The obscured soul would look at at people from, you, me?

Joe: Probably so, yeah. With the veils of the ego, whatever we have identified with as being who we are on the ego level, that would come between us and the other person's soul, and we would be able to see their ego But the ego alone is not able to encounter very easily the soul of another.

Nanette: Would you describe it as a more dualistic way of seeing the world in the obscured soul? We need a right and a wrong, we need a good and a bad, we need a you versus me.

Joe: You're for me or against me. You're in my tribe or you're not in my tribe. You understand me or you don't understand me. That's in its most A sleep form. Yes. Of course there are various degrees of the veils lifting even in the obscured soul. In fact, for some of us, I know my own life, when my soul was very obscured, there were times that it was totally non-obscured. And these are times during births, deaths, losses, encounters that are of another world, so to speak, and even in our dreams, in which we come to certain truths in the dreams that we would never have been able to encounter on the ego level. Because see, in the dream, the ego veils are really not as prominent.

Nanette: So that person who has been living in this state may have had moments in time where this obscurity was lifted, where they really saw divinity, where they really experienced something beyond their ego.

Joe: Absolutely. And we also have very deep memories of a time when we were in essence. We have deep memories of when we used to move in the world in bliss. And though we aren't necessarily moving in that world now, we know that it must exist. That's why there's such a quest for bliss, for being able to float in the world instead of work for every step we take, and why there's such a quest for happiness. Because if we can, I'll put it to you this way, we know it's there, But we don't know that it is in the return to essence as how we get there. The ego has us get there by imitating bliss and happiness and no separation between us and the goodness of the world. But when the ego's veils are taken down and, for example, we can come to re-embody ourselves as we were in total essence as a soul child, for example, then we know, we remember. George Gurdjieff said, this is part of self-remembering, understanding and re-embodying what we knew we really were, but we lost it in identifying with this way we walk around the world.

Nanette: For whatever reason, maybe the quest for bliss for that for that moment where maybe they remember, we find ourselves and the emerging soul, which we discussed last week, and how would the emerging soul begin to see another?

Joe: Well the emerging soul has many more glimpses of many more instances of self-remembering and there again it can be in flashes or in dreams or in encounters with other people who are in soul or evoke soul and that makes us want to match them with speaking with them from our own soul, because we feel invited, we feel safe, we feel the hospitality from one soul to our own. And while we're with those people, we can be unobscured. But when we leave that safe environment, the walls or the veils reappear.

Nanette: How then does someone move from the emerging soul truly to a palpable soul? Because that doesn't happen very often, does it?

Joe: It doesn't have to be a soul who's always in soul, but it is the level of soul development where you can feel its aliveness and its vitality, and you make no mistake about it, you are in the presence of essence, And it helps you understand not only that you may not be in that state right now, but it makes you want to be in that state. It makes you want to also be palpable. It's invitational. It's invitational. And it is those people who have switched from personality being their major way of moving in the world, to what I call soulality, as their major way of moving in the world. And in soulality, we're not always in soul, but we always want to have soul be our leader, even when we miss that mark. We still want their egos to submit to that soul.

Nanette: Do you have some recognizable examples of people we might know that are palpable souls?

Joe: Well, I've known a few, and they were people I greatly admire. One was a gentleman when we lived in Concord, Massachusetts, many years ago. And he was the landlord of the little house that my wife and I rented. And his home was in the back of this little cottage we rented. And his name is Eric Parkman Smith. He was a comptroller for the main central railroad and would actually drive from Concord, Massachusetts, his hometown, to Portland several times a week for his job. And when he was there, however, in Concord, he often had us over to his house. and he had a wonderful housemate named Lily who was from Finland. He asked to come to Finland to live with him because she had no other family. Why did he choose her? Because Lily had been his nanny when he was a little boy. as she is a student from Finland who came to the United States, she lived with the Smith family and took care of Eric when he was a baby and a little boy. And to see them together, the love that they had, which it was a different kind of love. It was a friendship love. It was a mother-child love. It was a love of like minds because they communicated on many of the same planes. And when Lark, my wife and I, were invited to their home, you could feel the love almost at their doorstep. It was invitational. It was, as Henry Nouwen calls it, it was spiritual hospitality. And when we were with them, we were thous. We were given space. We were given honor. And of course, we were just in our early 20s. And to have these people in their 70s honor us and speak to us as if we were due any respect and cherished us. gave us a feeling of being invited into soul space. We didn't have the words for that then. We didn't understand solality, but we understood it on a palpable level. Our hearts knew it. Our guts knew it. Our minds knew that we were in the presence of two people who had passed over to solality and lived that way. I never hardly saw either of them out of solelity. For example, if someone was in a social setting and someone said something that was not complementary to either one of them, I noticed what they did with that. If they had a response, it was something like, well, that's okay. It was never a confrontational, I'm going to fight you response to argue the toss, because they had such a sense of okayness that was so rooted in their being, that they didn't have to fight for their soul to have a space.

Nanette: Joe, tell me, are you aware, I don't know at what level you knew them in your 20s, but are you aware of practices or life experiences that contributed to this soul experience that they were living out?

Joe: Well, yes, both of them did ascribe to a religious belief, but it was not a religion that would be evangelical or even denominational as we see them today. Concord is the place of the transcendentalists. Okay. They had a very heartfelt faith, from what I hear you may. Much akin to Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Bronson Alcott, her father. The transcendentalist movement that was given rise to basically around that little town is still palpable, to borrow that word again, today among many of the people who carried that tradition on. And when we were there, much of that tradition was also carried on in the Unitarian religious organization, or church if you will, that is still very much alive in Concord today. So they did have that kind of transcendent belief structure. and would often refer to Emerson or Thoreau or Alcott and were steeped in that consciousness So yes, to answer your question, I think they did share of that transcendental mind.

Nanette: And you, in your experience, could perceive this even in their own presentation, their radiance, there's something about those kind of people that seems to kind of shine somehow.

Joe: Yeah, I sensed a light. in them that made me want it, that made me wish that I could have that and move through the world that way. Granted, in their 20s, they may have been more like us, but because of their life experiences and how they processed them and the losses that both of them had to sustain, which I won't go into now, but there were many great losses each of them had. There was a deepening of their spirituality and of their consciousness that basically it was unobscured as far as I'm concerned. It was palpable to me.

Nanette: What a beautiful experience for you to have this relationship. We probably can identify some palpable souls that we know throughout history because they've marked it. It is that soul that makes us even know who they are, the Mother Teresas of the world, the Ghandis, or Nelson Mandela, or Desmond Tutu, or people that a history has marked their souls as being very palpable because it had such an impact. So if we think about our own soul's journey, and as you kind of alluded to, maybe your dear friends were not palpable at 20, what are some things that we can do to help develop soulality in us?

Joe: Well, there are many. I'm going to ask Scott to step in here. Okay. What have you noticed is a big help in developing your solality?

Scott: Well, for me, my embodiment practice is essential. I find it helps me experientially, sensationally feel where my center of awareness is, the quality of my energy, whether it's held up and away from the Earth and in a state of reactivity or if it is settled and rested. Another way of saying that is it comes back to my spiritual practice. Is these exercises I sit and I do them, or maybe I stand and I do them, but, you know, I do them intentionally, but it's not like sitting down and doing a practice and you do it so many times and you. Accumulate experience points, like in a video game. And then one day you level up to the next level of. development or whatever, it's more like going to the gym and exercising and like building a muscle. It's like building skills. Like I don't do a trickle down effect exercise just to say, look at me. I did the trickle down and that that's the name of the TEP exercise, by the way. Um, it's about sitting with intentionality and bringing my awareness to those qualities, to the quality of how my energy is showing up, how grounded or ungrounded I am. It's like bringing awareness to a sensational feeling of that. in the container of sitting down and doing the exercise and then that builds the skill of noticing when I'm out and about and something happens and my energy ramps up. Like noticing that that is happening in the moment and then bringing that practice, those skills to it in that moment to help. come back into my soul, if you will, come back into groundedness, come back into the present moment, back into relationship, however you want to describe it. So it doesn't necessarily need to be TEP for everybody, but some sort of spiritual practice that helps us notice where we're at and how we're doing and develop skills that we can bring into everyday life.

Nanette: Well, it's interesting that you said in knowing where we're at, Scott, can, can we recognize what level we're at? And is it even useful? Or do we differentiate? I don't know. I feel like if somebody knows their soul is obscured, it's probably not, you know, it's maybe they're, they're emerging, right? It's like you, you, you don't know your, asleep until you wake up, you know. It's about awareness. It's about awareness. Is it useful to assess ourselves? Can we? Or is that just an ego drive?

Joe: Oh, I think it's very important to, and I think Scott made this point, it's very important to be at a level of self-awareness so that we know what's going on inside of us. If we don't, then we may say or do things that really are not what we intend. Or we may live like Pepsi through a soda straw, never really encountering reality. We would just live going through motions. Again, like Gurdjieff said, like we would be sleepwalking through life. I think awareness is the whole thing.

Nanette: Can you find awareness alone, or do you need a community for that? The heart of my question, I think, is the idea, you know, obviously a lot of times our spiritual practices are done as individuals. You know, we make, you make the effort to practice TAP, right? You, Joe, you have your own spiritual practices that I know you do on your own, but As far as living out soul development, it is hard for me to believe that, and you even started with relationship from the first, right? Thou and thou. And it's hard for me to imagine that our souls can develop on our own, that it takes, I would think it takes a community.

Scott: I mean, I feel that our souls can't develop on their own. Because the idea that you can do anything alone I think is fundamentally flawed. That the ego thinks that there's independence in the world and nothing is independent from anything else. All reality is in relationship with the rest of reality and we have desensitized to that in our unconsciousness. So, you know, if a spiritual community or what have you is not available to you, you can still practice on your own. And I think that's crucial, but you're not really doing it alone. You're doing it in partnership with the present moment, with reality, with the divine. It's my firm belief that a spiritual practice is not something that you retreat within yourself to do and you fix yourself in a vacuum and you carve out and establish consciousness on your own. To me, a spiritual practice is about helping sensitize yourself to patterns that you weren't aware of, that were coded into you by your individual woundings and your cultural woundings that are keeping you from feeling the present that are compromising your natural spaciousness or or your transparency to the divine and spiritual practices are for getting the cotton balls out. Philip has this beautiful metaphor of our body, our being, like a bell or a singing bowl, and the present, and I think in the ICB, I would call it the divine as well. We're always being wrong, but we're stuffed full of cotton balls, and we don't feel it, and we don't resonate to it. It's about getting the cotton balls out so we can feel what's already there. So in that sense, it's impossible to do it alone. But I also acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege of an available community of like-minded people and they can still find a spiritual practice that they can do individually. Because individuality exists, what doesn't exist, in my opinion, is independence. And we tend to confuse the two.

Joe: I love the question because in the history of spirituality, there are many people who meditated alone, many people who went to the desert alone, But I think that if we take those who developed themselves and then put it into practice, where did they put it into practice? Where did Nelson Mandela put his into practice? Yes. He put it into his smaller organization first and then the ripple effect to the point that it rippled to over his entire country. You take Mohammed, he did not work in a vacuum either. Community is essential. to Islam and to Christianity. For me personally, the community is very important because it helps me understand other perspectives that I really do not have access to. For example, every ego or every personality is basically a soul first. And that soul is an expression that only they individually, they express it in a way that no one else can. And if I am not in community, I am missing out on many other soul perspectives on reality and on what is true and what is good and what is the best and what is the most healthy. I do not have a corner on the market of that, no matter how much meditating I do. And so it's going into the community that I personally get the feedback. necessary for me to recalibrate and go, oh, I didn't see it that way. Or, oh, I didn't know that I said that. Or, oh, I didn't mean to represent that idea. Those words weren't the best. And thank you for lovingly pointing that out to me. The part of God you are is improving the part of God I am. Without that, I don't know, I would be some kind of self-contained system that knew it all, and that would be total disintegration for me.

Nanette: So for listeners who might feel stuck or discouraged, what is a practice or a truth that could help them move forward in their own soul development?

Joe: Well, that is the question, isn't it? That all spiritually minded people have to wrestle with and find a place of peace for. And Annette, I believe that is an individually answered question. because we all have by various shapings and conditionings and as Scott said past experiences we all have our special needs and to search for what quenches the thirst of those needs is the first step to having those needs, in my estimation, be quenched. And for people to explore different spiritual practices is very important. because they won't make headway if they try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Some people do not respond, for example, to Lecto Divina. which is a type of prayer study scripture. Other people, that is the only way that truth comes through to them in any measurable way. They're very big proponents. Some people love meditation. Other people find that their mind is too full of thoughts for it to ever be cleared and they need a way for those thoughts to be externally dealt with through the body and for them Many of my friends tell me yoga is an absolutely wonderful way to allow the body to feel the spiritual progression, which then informs the heart, which also, of course, in tandem, informs the mind. The thing I respect about people is when they tell me that they are trying, that they are looking into ways to improve and other practices that are going to help them become more grounded, help them live in the present more, and help them be able to love other people and themselves more deeply. So it's that quest that I'm so happy with seeing in other people. It's a privilege.

Nanette: What gives you the most hope about the soul's journey today, especially in a world so dominated by ego-driven systems?

Scott: Well, it gives me hope, like Joe said, to see people trying. So I don't know. I don't know in any conceptual or abstract way what moving out of this mess, this mess of world dominated by ego driven systems. I don't know what moving out of that specifically will look like. I mean, I have feelings, I have ideas, I have musings. How accurate, grounded, realistic is it? I don't know. But the fact that people are trying, there are people trying to feel more, to live more authentically, to live more in a way that is in integrity with reality, it gives me hope that maybe we'll find our way. And I think however change happens, it will, it'll have to be from the bottom up for it to be lasting change. Like anything implemented top down is just more ego. Cause when we're unconscious, I feel we're in a divided state. One part of us managing and organizing the rest of us and our. Like as Philip says, our primary relationship becomes between the divided parts of the self and collectively to try to just implement some idea of what a more conscious society would look like would just be yet another form of top-down organization, a kinder, gentler form of collective or self-tyranny, if you will. So I have hope because I see people trying and struggling with it and bringing the patience and the curiosity and the focus to feel their way through it without rushing to conclusions. So our culture loves answers. and is very uncomfortable with questions, but it's in the process of pondering a question that you find stuff. And the question of what does a soul-driven society look like compared to an ego-driven society, that is not a question to quickly or succinctly answer. And I'm very suspicious of neat, tidy answers to such big questions.

Joe: What about yourself, Nanette? What gives you spiritual hope?

Nanette: Well, I do have hope as I look around the world, if we just think about the people who practice yoga and meditation in a way that, while I was growing up, I certainly never heard of. I think there is a, people are aware that they, can practice spirituality in a way that could start to heal the soul, that could reveal it certainly, and maybe begin to heal the world. I think I hear more talk about that and maybe that's because of the The community that I'm engaged with, with this podcast, with the Institute for Conscious Being, we're certainly a group of people who are working on soul development. We have had moments of waking up, we are searching for bliss, and that gives me hope that I certainly don't think we're the only ones who are doing it. It's that thing that when you look for it, you find it, you know. And if we look for hope, we find it. That if we look at the world with the hope that we can move away from an ego-driven society, that we can dream about a world that might be soul-driven, that gives me hope. So, I would just say if you're listening to this today and it's piqued your interest, if you're seeking your bliss and you don't have a community and you might be interested in ours, we'd love for you to check us out. Check out our website, check out our offerings, come to a conference, engage with us. We may be the community that might help develop your soul.

Scott: If you are listening, if you are in our audience in some way, you are already part of our community. We'd love to have you check out more if you want.

Nanette: Yeah. Thanks so much, guys. Good conversation.

Scott: Thank you, Annette. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O. The music for today's podcast was composed and performed by ICB faculty member Drexel Rayford.

Nanette: Thanks for listening today. We hope you liked what you heard. If you did, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this with your friends and family.